Solving the “last-mile” problem has been an important piece of providing ubiquitous, high-speed Internet access to business and residential customers (“subscribers”) at their premises. Digital Subscriber Line (“DSL”) and CATV Internet services, are now well-entrenched means of solving the last-mile problem. Internet over satellite is now being offered by various telecommunication service providers, and land-based fixed wireless solutions such as those being promulgated by companies such as Soma Networks Inc. of San Francisco Calif., also offer the promise of effective last-mile solutions. See for example WO0189096A2 published Nov. 22, 2001.
A common feature of last mile solutions is a switching station that has a gateway connected to the Internet via a backhaul, such as a T1, T3, or a virtual network or the like. The gateway interfaces the backhaul with the particular communication medium or channel used to deliver the Internet service to the subscriber premises.
In DSL (and its variants, commonly referred to xDSL) the switching station is typically a central office as commonly found in the public switched telephone network (“PSTN”), and the gateway is a Digital Subscriber Line Access Module (“DSLAM”). The communication medium is typically the traditional twisted pair of copper wires that run between the central office and subscriber premises, and normally connect to a plain old telephone service (“POTS”) telephone in the subscriber premises. Where the subscriber is a DSL customer, the twisted pair of copper wires in the customer premises are also connected to a DSL modem, which in turn connects to the subscriber's computer or intranet.
Problems with the foregoing arise when a subscriber loses, or believes they have lost, Internet connectivity. To troubleshoot this problem, it is common for the service provider to send a service technician to the subscriber premises. To verify Internet connectivity, the service technician can attempt to make their own Internet connection from the subscriber premises in order to assess whether a connectivity problem actually exists, and if so, to attempt to determine the nature of the problem. However, such use of service technicians can be wasteful, particularly where the technician discovers that no connectivity problem exists and that the subscriber's problems are in fact related to the subscriber's proprietary equipment, or other equipment located at the subscriber's premises. Where connectivity problems are found to exist, then the service provider is faced with the additional cost of dispatching a service technician to the central office housing the DSLAM to perform further troubleshooting. In fact, where connectivity problems are found to exist at the DSLAM, it is actually common to simply change the subscriber's port on the DSLAM, without troubleshooting the cause. This can lead to having DSLAMs with several unused ports, as the service provider may elect not to troubleshoot those DSLAMs due to costs and labour issues surrounding the administration of central offices.
It is therefore desirable to have ways to test network connections over twisted pair networks and the like that reduce the reliance on technicians to be dispatched to specifically identify and repair network connections problems. Still further problems with prior art testing of network connections include a lack of ability to remotely test at the application layer and/or certain other layers above the physical layer of a given connection.